I'm white, but my father is pretty swarthy and has kinky hair. I inherited my mother's coloring -- very fair. One day when I was about six or so I held up my arm because I thought I had a sort of tan. My dad held up his (much darker) arm next to mine and said "Look! We're of different racial sects!" Ah, that's why he's so much darker, I thought: because he's black! I didn't really understand genetics, obviously, but I thought of one of my best friends as black, and he had a white mom and a black dad, so it all seemed totally reasonable. I don't remember how long it took for me to figure things out.
As an add-on to this, the picture of Abraham Lincoln hanging up in my 1st-grade classroom looked a bit like my dad, so I decided that he was black too. Made sense why he would want to free the slaves, didn't it?
A childhood belief about nationalities
others believed things like this
- I thought that old movies were black and white because the world was black and white then. — K
- I used to think that the old days were actually black and white because of the old black and white pictures.— Leigh Taylor
- When I was little I used to believe that black people saw in black and white. — Chelsea
- I used to believe that old films were in black and white because thats how the world looked then.— JC
- I used to believe that a long time ago, just like in old pictures, the world was black and white loolAnon
- I thought black people were black because they drank chocolate milk. — Shelby